Immortal Ascension: Rise of The Forgotten Vessel

Chapter 4

It stood at the far end of the terrace, and the first thing Ethan registered was its size — not the exaggerated size of something in a story, but the quiet, matter-of-fact size of a creature that simply exists at a different scale than the things you are used to seeing. It was roughly the height of a large horse at the shoulder but longer, with six limbs rather than four, and a broad, low-set head carrying a rack of branching antlers from which the cold blue-white light pulsed in those same slow intervals he had seen from the wall.

Its fur was very dark, and it moved across the terrace stones with an unhurried, deliberate weight that had nothing aggressive in it. Somewhere on the slope behind it, Ethan could hear disciples shouting — a qi strike flared orange against the dark sky and scattered off the beast's flank without any visible effect, and the beast did not turn or pause, only continued moving forward at the same steady pace. It was not responding to them. It was not interested in them. It was heading somewhere specific, and everything between it and that place was simply not relevant to what it was doing.

Ethan looked at where it was heading. Then he understood, and stayed where he was.

It crossed the last of the terrace and stopped about four feet in front of him.

Up close, its eyes were pale grey — almost colourless — and they held a quality that was difficult to account for. Not animal in the way he would have expected, but not human either. Something with more duration than either, the steadiness of something that has been present long enough that very few new things require a reaction from it. It looked at him the way still water looks at whatever settles on its surface — fully, without judgment, without urgency.

Then it lowered its head.

The motion was slow and deliberate. The great antlered skull dipped forward and down until the tips of the rack were level with Ethan's chest, and the blue-white light in the antlers softened as it went, shifting from that cold pulse into something quieter and steadier, the way a lamp settles when the wick stops flickering. The beast held the position without moving, and the distant sounds of the disciples and the alarm bells seemed to recede for a moment into the background.

Ethan stood in the cold night air and looked at the crown of the beast's skull and could not think of a single appropriate thing to say or do. So he did nothing, and the beast held its bow, and the mountain wind came through the pines with that low unhurried sound, and after a few seconds the beast raised its head again.

Those pale eyes found his once more and held them — and in them Ethan thought he recognised something, though he could not have named it precisely. It felt like the end of a long wait. Like something that had been carrying a particular errand for a very long time and had finally delivered it, and was now free to go.

Then the beast turned and walked back the way it had come, crossed the terrace without hurrying, and disappeared into the tree line. The light on the ridge faded as it went, until the sky above the trees was dark again.

 

The disciples arrived two or three minutes later, which was about how long it took them to regroup after realising the beast had stopped responding and simply wasn't there anymore. Cole came first, qi still active at his palms, eyes moving quickly across the terrace.

"What are you doing out here?" He found Ethan and seemed genuinely confused by the sight of him. "Where did it go?"

"Back over the ridge," Ethan said. "Northeast, the same direction it came from."

"You saw it leave? You were standing out here the whole time?"

"I was checking on the herb storage."

"The herb storage is on the other side of the building." Cole looked at him for a moment with the expression of someone trying to decide whether this warranted further attention, then apparently decided it didn't. "The all-clear hasn't gone yet. Get inside."

He turned back to the other disciples, who had already begun sorting out amongst themselves which of their attacks had ultimately driven the beast off. Cole's wind-strike was getting significant credit. A combined earth-wall formation from two third-years was also under serious consideration. Ethan listened for a moment, then walked to the terrace wall and looked out over the dark ridge. The trees were still. No light, no sound apart from the wind.

He pressed his hand flat against his jacket and felt the edge of the slip through the fabric. You are not without. You are before. He still didn't fully understand what that meant. But the way the beast had looked at him — that long, settled quality in those pale eyes, the sense of something finally arriving at the right address after a considerable journey — made the words feel less abstract than they had that morning.

Whatever he was, something other than Elder Seth had apparently formed an opinion about it.

 

He found Mia in the inner hall, unharmed, sitting with two of the younger herb gatherers and eating the rice she'd set aside for the evening meal. She looked up when he came in and her expression moved through relief and then immediately into suspicion.

"You went outside," she said.

"I was looking for you."

"I was in here. There are bells specifically so people know to come in here." She studied his face for a moment in the way she sometimes did, reading something he wasn't consciously showing. "What happened?"

"Nothing dramatic. It left on its own." He sat down across from her. "Is there any rice left?"

She looked at him for another second — the particular look she used when she suspected he was telling the truth but not all of it — then slid her bowl across the table. He ate, and she went back to her conversation with the other gatherers, and he sat with the quiet of the inner hall around him and let the evening settle.

He wasn't ready to talk about the beast yet, or the bow, or the way the whole thing had felt less like an attack and more like a message. Not because he didn't trust Mia, but because he didn't yet have the right words for it, and saying something half-formed felt worse than saying nothing. There would be time to make sense of it.

For now, he finished the rice and listened to the all-clear bells ring out across the mountain, one tower at a time, until the last one faded and the Academy went quiet around him and the night was just the night again.